Wedding Redux – The Paper

Welcome to Wedding Week on City and Burbs! I hope you enjoy the journey through my wedding planning process 🙂

Planning our wedding last year was single-handedly the most incredible, overwhelming, fulfilling, nerve-wracking, and rewarding project I’ve ever taken on. There were so many conflicting emotions on the journey that when it all came together, it was absolutely exhilarating. I only wish I could marry my husband over and over again so that I’d have an opportunity to plan more weddings!

The most important thing to me while planning the wedding was to make sure that there was a common thread throughout all the details of the wedding. I’m a big fan of continuity but I’d hate to call it a theme because in this particular case, it was simply color (purple), a motif (a vine flourish), and the fonts (Garamond and Zapfino.) From the invitations to the photo share cards, every thing that had writing on it had these three things in common. Now, to be honest, I don’t even know if anyone noticed (probably not), but *I* noticed and it made me super happy to know what I had achieved. So, let’s begin the paper journey:

The Invitations

I have a tendency to be paralyzed by lack of information. I can’t move forward with something without investigating all the possible choices. So, navigating the unknown world of invitations was definitely a stumbling block for me right at the beginning of my wedding planning. I know what I like — simple and elegant — but I didn’t know how to translate that into invitations. I pored over page after page of invitations on sites like Wedding Paper Divas and found things that were okay, but didn’t quite click. Then finally, after a trip to a local invitation store in my town I finally realized why. For me, it wasn’t really about the illustrations on the invitation, it was all about the paper and the printing style. As soon as I saw a letterpress invitation printed on thick, cotton Crane card stock, I was in love. Unfortunately though, I wasn’t in love with the price of letterpress. For 125 simple, single-color invitations, reception cards and RSVP cards, I was looking at over $2000 and I just couldn’t justify it. I briefly entertained buying my own letterpress machine, but thankfully, I came across Invitations by Ajalon instead. They hit it out of the ballpark with the invitations and I couldn’t have been happier with the outcome:

Here’s a better one of the texture with our rings:

Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos of the RSVP cards and the reception cards because the leftovers were victims of Hurricane Irene, but you get the picture. The only thing I would have done differently if I could do it again is to put the invitations into some kind of folder, or put a belly band around all the cards (like this gorgeous set) because all I did was stuff them in the envelopes.

The Rest of the Paper

Once I settled on the invitations all other paper goods just sort of made themselves. I DIYed the ceremony programs, the menu cards and the escort cards and used the exact same fonts, colors and flourishes on all of them. You’ll also notice that I added a logo — I could have hired a graphic designer to do it but I just used Photoshop and made one on my own:

The Ceremony Programs:

The Menu Cards:

The Escort Cards:

I used thick linen paper for these projects that I purchased from a paper heaven I discovered (with the help of the ladies over on The Knot posting boards) called Xpedx. That linen stock and my paper cutter were my best friends throughout this process!

Photo Share Cards

These turned out so much better in my mind than in real life. The idea was that I’d make cards with the website of our photo share site, they’d be strewn across tables, people would take them home and then share their own pictures on our site. In theory, it worked. But the truth was that the photo share site I picked was not very user friendly. So while the photo share cards themselves were spectacular, the actual process was not. If I was to do it over again, I’d find another photo share site to use.

I used moo.com to print the mini-sized business cards:

The Favors

To offset the disappointment of the photo share, I’ll tell you the best thing that we spent money on — the photo booth. It turned out to be one of the most fun activities for our guests and the photo booth attendant handed us an instant photo album with all the photo booth shots at the end of the wedding. It was wonderful and our guests got to take home some awesome memories. We used Partybooths and they were both cost effective and delivered an excellent product. We even got to put our logo at the bottom of the photos.

The photos were 4×6 so as a favor I gave my guests a 4×6 frame. I put a thank you message in the frame, wrapped them in white organza mesh gift bags and hung them off the back of each of the Chiavari chairs.

And that pretty much covers most of the paper products that we used for our wedding day. Honestly, since most of this stuff was DIY, it really was my favorite aspect and an experience I won’t soon forget.

I still absolutely love looking at peoples’ wedding projects so if you’ve written about it on your own blog, be sure to share the link in the comments and I’ll check it out.

Tomorrow, look forward to the details on the venue, the vendors and the thank you cards. Thanks for reading!